The present disclosure relates to an image processing apparatus, method and computer program product for displaying character information such as a tweet regarding a broadcast program on a screen along with the broadcast program, and relates to a video-picture recording apparatus for recording the character information and the broadcast program.
At the present day, there has been provided a TWITTER (a registered trademark) which renders short-sentence services serving as a function between chatting, and a blog and an SNS (Social Network Service) through a network such as the Internet. These services allow short-sentence tweets following a specific short-sentence tweet registered by a certain user in a TWITTER server to be registered by an unspecified user other than the certain user. In this way, a user is capable of disclosing a tweet of its own with a light heart whereas other users are capable of, among others, responding to the tweet. The number of characters included in a tweet that can be registered is 140 or an integer smaller than 140. Posted tweets are displayed along the time axis by adoption of a display method referred to as a time line. That is, a tweet posted most recently is displayed on the top to be followed sequentially in the downward direction by tweets posted less recently to form a flow of tweets. Each individual link information for a still picture, a moving picture or a piece of music can be added to a tweet after the still picture, the moving picture or the piece of music has been uploaded at another site to result in the link information.
By looking at a hash-tag in a posted tweet, it is possible to identify what the tweet has been posted for. There are a number of users each posting a tweet for a broadcast TV program. In this case, if the broadcasting station is the NHK (Nihon Housou Kyoukai) for example, a “#nhk” hash-tag seen by a user as a hash-tag included in a tweet makes the user capable of determining that the tweet has been posted as a tweet for the NHK.
In recent years, there has been provided a function for displaying information on tweets regarding such a broadcast program on a screen of a TV receiver or the like along with the broadcast program. For details of the function, the reader is advised to refer to Non-Patent Document 1, “Linked Network Torne Update Ver. 2.10 Library,” Sony Computer Entertainment Corporation [online], searched on Mar. 18, 2011, Internet <URL: http://www.jp.playstation.com/ps3/torne/update/index.html>.